Milk Makeup's Secret Weapon for Merchandising at Sephora

For brands who rely on sales in Sephora and Ulta, education and merchandising are key. That’s why earlier this year, Milk Makeup made a big decision to gain a competitive advantage in Sephoras nationwide. They equipped their education and merchandising team with Repsly.

After just a few weeks equipped with the Repsly app, the team is now 800% more efficient. They’ve replaced manual write-ups with easy-to-use reports that include before and after photos of every gondola. Now, Milk Makeup can see how their products are merchandised at every store in real time.

The best part? With Repsly they spend just 30 minutes pulling that data together every week. Before that, it took them up to 4 hours of combing through messy email threads to build every report. What would you do with a few extra hours every week?

Hang tight, we’ll walk you through how they went from sloppy to streamlined in less than a month:

“My merchandising team has been able to streamline virtually everything, cut back on emails, and easily report on it all.”

Before Repsly: The Basics

Here are the facts: Milk Makeup’s field team of seven visit more than 200 Sephora stores nationwide, ensuring merchandising compliance and educating cast members. Basically, it’s their job to make sure every gondola looks perfect.

But what happens when their shelves are empty, the lighting’s broken, or the testers have run out? Before they found Repsly, the Milk team simply jotted some notes about their findings in an email and sent them out to the whole team.

At the end of every week the team’s Director of Field Sales, István Hrichak, would comb through every email and note the merchandising problems his team had flagged. A few hours later, and he’d have a list of issues to follow up on with Sephora’s store managers.

Before Repsly: The Burden

The old process sounds simple enough, but it created a significant amount of work for a team that was already stretched thin. Email chains full of merchandising reports would quickly grow to contain hundreds of messages the entire team was copied on -- talk about information overload.

What’s more, reading through every write-up took István as long as half a dayevery week, time that would be better spent resolving merchandising inconsistencies and developing cast member training programs.

“We were looking for an easier way to organize all of the merchandising activity that was going on at our accounts nationwide.”

With Repsly: The Boost

Once they found Repsly, the Milk Makeup team eliminated those cumbersome email write-ups virtually overnight. In their place? A new, elegant form for reporting merchandising errors within the Repsly mobile app.

Right from the store, the Milk team can answer simple questions like, “Is the gondola lighting installed correctly?” “Is our display missing any pieces?” and “Have any missing pieces been ordered yet?” Plus, they can snap and attach photos to document merchandising errors right from the app. Through this fully customizable form, Milk Makeup’s merchandising team can flag and key track issues, then share their results with HQ with a simple tap.

Back in the office, István can see the entire team’s merchandising forms as they are submitted in real-time. Plus, Repsly automatically tags every report with the specific store location where it was filled out, making it easy to see where and when merchandising problems arise.

Beyond real-time visibility, István also pulls a more refined weekly report from Repsly detailing the action items and new trends his team has uncovered. With Repsly, Milk Makeup gets a more clear, comprehensive, and shareable merchandising report, with practically no manual effort.

“With Repsly, I’m finally getting feedback from my field team in a format that’s easy to use and respond to.”

With Repsly: The Benefits

At the end of the day, Repsly helped grow Milk Makeup’s merchandising into a more mature, efficient organization practically overnight. Trading manual write-ups for streamlined mobile reports cut out hours of admin every week and made reporting 800% faster. Repsly paved the way for better quality and agility team-wide, two critical qualities for a team that’s planning to grow by 50% in the coming year.

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Frank Brogie

Connect with Frank Brogie

Frank Brogie is the Content Marketing Manager at Repsly. A hungry researcher with experience blogging about both technology and brand building, he’s excited to help his readers grow their brands. When his hands aren’t on the keyboard, they’re probably playing disc golf or shooting hoops.